When Caregivers Hurt: Embodying Grief
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When Caregivers Hurt: Embodying Grief
What does a caregiver do when they go through their own tragic losses? Although we don’t often admit it, many of us caregivers go into the line of work we do because there is something cathartic about helping ourselves through helping others. There is a natural tendency in all humans to want to avoid pain. Caregivers can be particularly good at masking their own pain through the perceivably commendable actions of putting other’s first. Quicker than others, caregivers can often see the pain on the horizon, due to our knowledge of grief, and run fast and far away to avoid confronting it head on. Or, we as caregivers can choose to give it the welcome space it deserves.
I admit, I am GUILTY of this avoidant and detachment posture. I’ve been contemplating around it these last several days of personally grieving.
When we recently received our new-to-us, one year-old rescue lab a little less than a month ago, we saw signs of a cold. The doctors sent her home with antibiotics, but as the days went on and the antibiotics lacked, it became apparent she was much worse than that. This past week, our family watched our poor girl suffer from the overwhelm of continuous and paralyzing seizures. Over the course of just one week, her whole body went from a playful young pup, into a non-stop foaming, and catatonic-state canine. Doctors could not understand the reasoning or where they were coming from. In just a matter of days, we saw her body deteriorate to an unrecognizable state. In the last 12 hours of her life, her seizures increased in length and duration. Her body violently flopping around the floor, a traumatic sight I never wished anyone, especially my kids would see. After praying with fervent hope just days prior, we made the calculated decision to put her out of her misery,
Just 3 weeks. That is the total duration of time that we had her. And sadly, that is the same amount of time we had our last dog. 3 short weeks. It was a similar scenario with different manifestations leading to death. We learned both had incurable diseases we would never have known when we adopted them.
We now mourn the loss of both of these unjust and bizarre scenarios, where all we wanted was a furry new family member. And what we got was a list of losses a page long. Both Tracker and Azula were sweet animals with a lot of life left to live and a home where they were wanted and loved. It still makes no sense to us but here we are presented head on with the death of a loved animal and the grief that remains.
Grief doesn’t make sense. It is laden with unanswered questions and deep heartache around what never will be.
Yesterday as I let the tears stream down my face, I had little energy to do anything else. And yet surprisingly after we cried and shared together as a family, my 7 & 11 year old children wanted to dance! DANCE! If I didn’t know better I would be angry at the insensitivity of the moment. But my knowledge of embodied grief told me that this visibly happy energy is as natural as tears. Kids demonstrate for us logical, linear adult-types that our body will naturally find ways to hold or release our feelings. If we learn to listen to it, we will be able to respond to the cries and needs are body is trying to communicate.
Not only do we seldom see healthy expressions of grief we are fighting against what is the "right way" to grieve. We hear judgment statements like, “She was handling the loss so well. She was so put together as they buried him. He seems to be over it!”
Simultaneously, how can we criticize when we don’t know how to embody grief in healthy ways. With the rise of modern psychology there is value given to talk therapy as an outlet for grief. While talk therapy has proven beneficial in many ways, we quickly learn the limits of the left logical brain. While it’s not necessarily easier to talk about trauma or loss, it has become our adult form of dealing with the pain.
Even as I write this, the words lack in explanation and healing power of the pain we recently experienced. The words lack, because words are meant to lack. We are not meant to experience grief in a logical, analytical, figure-it-all-out kind of way. And yet that is often the only “culturally appropriate” model of healing that we are given. We can’t talk our way out of the pain. The knowledge that our brain has a limit to how it can logically interact with trauma or grief directs us to discover other ways of dealing with grief. We must integrate our whole brain and consider how the right, creative brain can teach us to be active in our bodies as a means of release.
Now known, but seldom practiced, is the understanding that grief can get stuck in the body…our bodies know and need permission to let go! Think of a recent blow up you’ve seen in a child or adult. This is an expression of built up grief. Doctors have noted there have been direct ties to headaches, stomach problems, back pain and heart attacks correlating to unresolved grief the body has absorbed and not released.
In the well-known book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel VanDerKolk challenges us that we can circumvent the speechlessness that comes with trauma, grief and loss by releasing it through the healing powers of art, music, dance and movement. Bottom line, you have to feel it to heal it!
You have to feel it to heal it!
As my colleague Eve Austin, a professional counselor friend reminded me recently, grief needs an outlet. She said, “______it out (dance, sing, cry, shout, run, walk, hike, stretch). Give your grief a physical and tangible outlet.” In times of grief we must find a physical outlet that allows your body to healthily engage and release the intensity of emotions that come with it. It’s not as natural for me as for my children. But it is persistently on my radar to listen well and discover new ways to release my body from carrying the burden associated with loss.
Here are a few other ideas on concrete ways to “grieve well”:
1. Take a long silent walk with a friend.
2. Create a list of losses (i.e. the loss of dreams, the loss of money, the loss of voice, the loss of hope). Both the tangible and the intangible losses need a release.
3. Acknowledge these losses and schedule time to “work them out” via exercise or alongside a trusted friend.
4. Create a ritual such as lighting a candle once a week and space to think about the losses.
5. Do simple stretches while you create this space, thanking your body for how it has been with you in all of this.
6. Shake it out!
7. Dance it out!
8. Read the Psalms of Lament and write your own.
9. List off the gifts that came with what you lost.
10. Use color or drawing to engage.
Grief is really gratitude in response to a gift. My wise friend Eve also reminded me that “Holding both, the grief and gratitude, eventually starts to balance me out so I don’t tip over into the abyss of loss.”
Living includes loss. There is no way around it. I am to find my way into grief and allow myself permission and safe spaces to go there. This is the ongoing work of grieving that us caregivers must especially do. We must embody the grief and disembody the grief by letting it go. This is an act of care for ourselves and a model for those that we care for.
Grief is really gratitude in response to a gift.
For further thought:
What does grieving look like for you? What have you personally found helpful? Where do you struggle most?
